As was widely reported this week, Visa and IBM announced a partnership to bring together the systems and analytics capabilities of IBM Watson with the payment infrastructure of Visa. Near term solutions planned for this partnership are focused on car-based payments, meaning equipping cards with payment tokens to pay for gasoline, parking and other related purchases. Venture Beat reported:
Payments will rely on the Visa Token Service, a digital identifier for payment processing that first debuted in 2014. Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay were version one of these tokens. The IBM Watson IoT platform will help Visa scale to the 20 billion wearable and connected devices expected by 2020, he said.
“When we think about the future of IoT, certainly from a connected perspective, we have an opportunity to extend our platform into all sorts of devices where the historic card and terminal just doesn’t work,” said Visa executive VP Jim McCarthy said onstage at Genius of Things Summit today in Munich.
The idea of having gas stations payments completed through the car sounds like a real convenience that consumers would like and support. As with all payments however, success will hinge on concentration of locations where the new technology can be used. If only a few locations will accept this new payment form, IoT car payments may find adoption painfully slow as Apple Pay and Android Pay have experienced with a relatively low number of locations accepting NFC.
Overview by Sarah Grotta, Director, Debit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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